Chapter XX

Now calmly, almost reverently, the Namer set a dark stone in a notch of the circlet. He set another, and again one more. Soon six stones lay in a glimmering field, and the Namer continued, setting and naming.

"There are all kinds of traps," he said, and his listeners shifted uneasily and looked about.

The vaulted room wherein Ramiro and I found ourselves was lined with nearly empty shelves, littered only with an occasional ledger, scroll, or manuscript. Leather volumes sat precariously high out of reach, their spines scrawled with lines and patterns that were either some incredibly random form of decoration or an indecipherable alphabet. Some were moldy from the ever-present damp.

It made Gileandos's library look small and shabby. What was more, since the leather was regularly oiled on most bindings, I gathered that these volumes had been read at one time or another, unlike those we had back home in the moathouse, which our tutor had collected for their thickness and mustiness and ponderous-sounding titles.

Under Gileandos's tutelage, I had never been all that much of a book lover, so for me, these volumes, too, were just interior decoration. Far more to my interest were the Que-Tana themselves, the dreadfully pale creatures who glided in and out of the room on obscure duties.

They were not much more attractive in daily activity than they were as hillside assailants. They were sort of blue-skinned, with bulbous eyes and sparse waxen hair-at first glance, more like exotic tubers than humans. Their speech was indecipherable when they addressed each other, though it sounded, as you might expect, faintly like the language Longwalker had spoken to his followers, full of hard consonants and little breathing. Yet it was no longer Que-Nara Plainsman that was spoken, but a darker tongue, filled with enormous silences and echoes and deep watery vowels that rose from the depths of the throat.

I heard the same music in their common speech when they spoke to us, their fluency drawn into the dark undertow of their subterranean accents. I thought of hot springs and geysers.

Quite abruptly, the business and noise around me died down. Adorned more formally, with beads and necklaces and carrying a tall hooked staff, Firebrand himself approached me from the far end of the porch.

"I trust you have been made comfortable?" he asked, pulling a reed chair to my bedside and seating himself.

Ramiro sidled casually within earshot. The Que-Tana, on the other hand, moved quickly away before the man was seated, attending shyly to some task on the other side of the room.

"Oh, as comfortable as can be expected," I answered in common speech.

"I see," Firebrand replied. "I fear there's little I can do regarding either your departed brother or the vespertiles, but perhaps we can see to it that your… remaining brother is restored to you."

"It would be about time," I said. "A whole day and a half we've been confined here, by my reckoning. And after all, my brother's release was the deal we struck through the opals."

Firebrand gestured dramatically, and through the door strode Brithelm, as disheveled as ever, but looking all right considering kidnap and submergence. Brithelm smiled amiably, bumped into a lectern, and sent rolls of parchment flying about him.

"Excuse me," he murmured, as Plainsmen rushed to retrieve the skittering rolls. Brithelm bent over, picked up one leaf of a manuscript, and scanned it as he walked to a sconce on the wall to get some light firmly at his back.

"Brithelm!" I shouted. "Thank the gods you're alive!"

He lifted his eyes from the page in front of him, and stared reverently toward the rock ceiling of the room.

"I thank the twenty-one gods that I am alive," he pronounced solemnly and returned to his reading.

"History!" he exclaimed delightedly. "My favorite!"

A young woman, her patience stretched beyond restraint, snatched the paper from his hand.

"Does it just go on and on about architecture?" Brithelm asked her disappointedly. "When I read history, I do love a good sword fight!"

"Well, then," Firebrand broke in, his fingers twitching with impatience. "About the deal we struck. As I recall, you have something to hand over to me, Sir Galen." He leaned forward, his dark hair spreading over his face, covering dark brow and leather eye patch and burning solitary eye.

I stood my ground. We had come to a place where neither fear nor courage made any difference. Firebrand had us- my brother, Ramiro, and me-and he would do whatever he wanted, regardless of my cowardice or bravado.

"As I understand," I replied, "you have waited centuries for what I bring you. Wait but a while longer, while I greet my brother."

I had no time for further words: Brithelm was on me, glad-handing me, thumping my back, and saying over and over again how happy he was that I had "dropped in for a visit."

His happiness, of course, made it clear that he had not heard about Alfric. But this was hardly the time for telling him. The way I had it figured, he stood to lose another brother in the coming hours.

"Actually, Galen," Brithelm said into the fresh silence as the Que-Tana drew near us and listened, "there's little else to do down here besides read and answer Firebrand's many questions."

"Many… questions?" I asked, looking over my brother's shoulder into the menacing eye of our captor.

"I trust, Sir Galen, that the… amenities have ended," he said coldly, an edge of anger in his voice. He extended his hand, palm up, and the air about us was charged, incandescent.

Slowly, reluctantly, I handed him the brooch. He trembled briefly and sighed when it lay in his hand. His Que-Tana bodyguards closed in a tight circle around him, their black eyes fierce and expectant. Ramiro, reclining all this time on a cot, rose to his feet and stood by me, looming.

"Now," I said as Firebrand lifted the brooch to the light, examining it ecstatically, "there is the matter of our leaving…"

"You have seen one another again, have you not?" he asked gruffly, his eye never leaving the glittering opals. "That is all I promised, if I remember correctly."

"Why, you mountebank of a…" Ramiro began, but the presence of a dozen glaring bodyguards rendered him discrete and silent.

Lowering the brooch and pinning it delicately to the shoulder of his robe, as smoothly and effortlessly as a woman prepares her jewelry for a banquet, Firebrand fixed his eye on me, regarding me directly. An ironic smile flickered across his face.

"You would make none too good a lawyer… Weasel, isn't it?" he asked playfully. "Oh, yes, I know all of that business, for the stones in my crown allowed me to watch you finagle your way about that little backwater castle as you came into knighthood. You were better as a weasel, lad, with your slyness and gutter smarts. If you had left Brithelm where he was, had backed off from your foolhardy venture while you had the chance, you'd still have another brother in the Bright Lands. Indeed, you'd still have years ahead of you."

He paused, rolling the staff in his dark hand.

"As it is, the years compress into minutes, and the Pathwardens themselves dwindle rapidly. I expect that your father back in Solamnia will think little of that honor of yours when he measures it against the lives of three sons and the death of his name."

I started to answer him, but the words fled down a dark corridor, leaving me alone and speechless and downright miserable, knowing that beneath all Solamnic show and glitter, my father's heart would agree with this villain, that through the years remaining for the old man, a part of him would hate me for my high-minded stupidity, for the chivalry that cost him all his heirs. Firebrand stared at me and nodded, assured that his words had drawn the deepest blood.